The Centenary and Beyond

The website of the Lausanne Project (TLP) was launched three years ago today. Having published 24 podcasts in 2022, we recently released our fiftieth episode. Our podcasts now receive at least 2,000 downloads within ten days of publication, and the most popular have now racked up more than double that.  We have also published over 100 blogposts on the site. Visitors in 2023 came from 52 countries, the top twelve being as follows:

We take pride in the range of contributors to these channels. Alongside leading scholars like Philip Mansel, Elizabeth Thompson, Lerna Ekmekcioglu, Jay Winter, Edhem Eldem and Erik-Jan Zürcher, our blogs and podcasts have also provided Masters students, PhD students and Early Career Researchers with an opportunity to make themselves and their research better known. Website traffic suggests that several of the PhD students have used their appearance on the TLP site to advance their own careers. Such fora for emerging scholars are particularly important, and we are delighted that we have been able to help, in a small yet significant way, promising researchers realize their potential. The podcasts, blogs and our online galleries of visual sources and material culture linked to the population exchange have now achieved critical mass as a resource for university teaching. Students at the universities of Lausanne, Barcelona, Utrecht and Newcastle have written blogs for us as a formal element of their courses.

Even with the enthusiastic participation of students, researchers, artists and journalists, maintaining the pace of weekly output has not been easy, given that we had very little funding (a couple hundred Euros) to support it. Starting this past January, therefore, we have been publishing these blogs/podcasts fortnightly (rather than weekly) in order to give our other programmes the care and attention they deserve.

They All Made Peace – What is Peace?

In the spring of 2023 TLP published its first edited volume, They All Made Peace – What is Peace? The 1923 Lausanne Treaty and the New Imperial Order (Gingko). The topics addressed by contributors range from Soviet, British and American practices of peace- and order-making to the artistic and discursive framing of Lausanne, as well as issues of minority rights, giving voice to the agendas of those “absent presences”, such as the Armenians, Arabs, Iranians. This volume emerged from our first conference, held in Paris in 2022.

Exhibitions

Having assisted curators at Flanders Fields Museum (Ypres) with their 2022 exhibition on the Great War in the Middle East and contributed to its catalogue, we were delighted to assist curator Gaby Fierz and the team at the Musée Historique Lausanne with their centenary exhibition Frontières: Le Traité de Lausanne, which ran from April to October 2023. Research by TLP scholars into satires by Aloïs Derso and Emery Kelèn and the Swiss secret police’s activities policing and surveilling the conference fed directly into this show, which provided the perfect setting both for the launch of our first edited volume and our first teachers workshop. Later this year we will be returning to the MHL for our second teachers workshop, and look forward to further collaborations with director Laurent Golay and his colleagues. 

Thessaloniki Conference

We felt that there remained a number of questions, especially relating to the population exchange, Greece and the Kurds, which we had yet to explore properly – although they had formed the focus of TLP podcasts with guests such as Martin van Bruinessen and Djene Bajalan, as well as a blogpost by Fidan Mirhanoglu. Participants at Paris were largely historians, and we were eager to engage with other disciplines, such as anthropology and international law. A second conference would, we hoped, make for a wide-ranging sequel to They All Made Peace – What is Peace? 

TLP’s 2023 conference, The Lausanne Moment, was co-convened in collaboration with the Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies and Laboratory of International Politics and Legal Studies (POLIS) at the University of Macedonia. Funded by a Gingko Library Encounters Grant and the Contesting Governance Platform at Utrecht University, the conference took place in Thessaloniki over three days (9-11 November 2023). Delegates came from the United States and Canada as well as China, Japan, the UK and the Netherlands, Czechia – and, of course, Greece and Turkey. As we had hoped, participants included political scientists, legal scholars, literary scholars, as well as an archaeologist and an anthropologist. The University of Macedonia were generous hosts, first and foremost Dr Leonidas Karakatsanis, assisted by Angeliki Stamati and a team of student helpers.

CONFERENCE DELEGATES TOUR ANO POLI

We are grateful to Eleni Kyramargiou’s research team for leading us on the tour in Thessaloniki as the closing event of our conference, and as part of their 100 Memories project, funded by the National Hellenic Research Foundation. We literally followed in the footsteps of those who have arrived and departed Salonika/Thessaloniki across the past century and a half. At one point our steps passed over a street literally paved with the recycled tombstones of the city’s vanished Jewish population. Here as in other former Ottoman cities, the dead as well as the living found themselves subject to radical dislocations, playing new parts not of their own choosing.

The conference as well as TLP’s work with school teachers were covered in Greek print (Makedonia) and television media. Selected papers from the conference will be published in an edited volume that will allow us to build on They All Made Peace – What is Peace? The new volume will be edited by Ozan Ozavci, Julia Secklehner and Georgios Giannikopoulos, with the support of Jonathan Conlin.

#Lausanne Diary

Run by TLP’s Jonathan Conlin, #LausanneDiary gave our X followers a daily “news flash” from Lausanne, which we published from November 2022 right through to June 2023. Based on archival sources, newspapers, cartoons and other media, @LausanneDiary offered followers an insight into the goings on at Lausanne, day-by-day, with each tweet timed to coincide with the exact centenary of the episode described. The tweets were also published in Greek and Turkish, thanks to our TLP interns Dimitrios Mitsopoulos, Buse Üretener, Sevde Bolat and Patrick Boyle. 

Out of Shadows

Having received helpful feedback on our first draft from a professional script-writer engaged by Gingko, TLP’s writing team of Jonathan Conlin, Ozan Ozavci and Julia Secklehner wrote a graphic novel entitled Out of Shadows. The heroes of traditional Near East shadow theatre, Karagöz and Hacivat (in Greek, Karagiosis and Hacivad – there are Armenian and other avatars of these individuals across the Near and Middle East) travel from their remote corner of the Ottoman Empire in search of self-determination and a quick buck (from oil). Along the way they encounter more than they bargained for: romance, murder, Ernest Hemingway and a curious cat…but also despair, dislocation and a good deal of disillusionment. After experiencing the highs (costume balls at the Beau Rivage) and lows (a spell in a Lausanne jail, where Mussolini once did time) that Lausanne had to offer a century ago, they return home to re-enter the shadow world of the theatre, with hard-won lessons for all of us today.

HACIVAT AND KARAGÖZ MEET ISMET ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS

In early 2023 we began working with an artist based in Istanbul, Gökçe Erverdi, based in Istanbul. A graduate of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Erverdi’s cartoons and illustrations have featured in various Turkish magazines. He has also produced graphic novel adaptations of Sabahattin Ali’s Kürk Mantolu Madonna and Kuyucaklı Yusuf. 

The writers and Erverdi were able to meet in Lausanne in June 2023, at the Lausanne launch of They All Made Peace – What Is Peace? This gave Erverdi an opportunity to visit the locations used in the novel. We also met with a Lausanne-based publisher of bandes dessinées, Antipodes, who agreed to publish a French edition under the title De la lumière à l’ombre. This will be launched in April 2024 at BDFIL, the Festival de Bande Dessiné Lausanne, an important annual gathering of artists, writers, publishers and fans of the genre. We plan to publish the graphic novel in other languages, including English, Turkish, Greek and Armenian.

Teaching Packages

TLP organised its first teaching workshop in Lausanne in July 2023. We brought high school history teachers from Greece and Turkey together at the Musée Historique Lausanne for a workshop, intended to develop new ways of teaching the events surrounding the 1923 population exchange. The informality of the gathering also provided opportunities for participants to engage in their own “Track II Diplomacy”, making connections across the national divide.

PARTICIPANTS AT OUR FIRST TEACHER WORKSHOP IN LAUSANNE

The aim of TLP’s teaching workshops and associated lesson plans is to challenge one-sided approaches to historical events that have been central to nation-centred narratives on both sides of the Aegean. These approaches have exploited a shared trauma of imperial collapse as opportunities for “othering” that continue to hamper dialogue. By the end of the three days a number of proposals had been co-created by pairs of Greek and Turkish teachers, ideas which were then turned into a suite of three lesson plans by a UK-based high school teacher, Dr Elena Stevens, author of 40 Ways of Diversifying the History Curriculum. The lesson plans and short introductory texts were then translated into Greek and Turkish.

HIGH SCHOOL WORKSHOP IN ISTANBUL, 11 FEBRUARY 2024

We are now working on ways of making these (as well as our earlier suite of lesson plans, produced in 2022) available for free to teachers on both sides of the Aegean. On 11 February 2024, a student workshop took place in Istanbul (organised by Turkish History Association, Tarih Vakfi) at which students form Turkey discussed Lausanne and the events surrounding it (imperial collapse, population exchange, oil, etc.) using our teaching materials and providing us with feedback. This feedback came not only from teachers, but also the students themselves, who participated in focus groups. We are in discussions with the Association for History Education in Greece (AHEG) about holding a similar event later this year, in Athens.

This June 24-27 2024 we will hold our second teachers’ workshop in Lausanne, made possible by a grant from Utrecht University’s Public Engagement Fund. In addition to reflecting on how they currently teach the events of a century ago and commenting on TLP’s existing lesson plans,  Greek and Turkish high school teachers and pupils will be invited to co-create new resources for classroom-based activities. Participants will visit the Palais de Rumine (where the Lausanne Treaty was signed), the Chateau d’Ouchy (where it was negotiated) as well as other sites closely associated with the conference. Starting in 2025, we plan to involve Utrecht University students in the production of teaching materials (as part of their assignments) for the use of high school teachers in Greece and Turkey, and we hope to expand our programme beyond Lausanne, thanks to funding secured from Utrecht University’s Community Engaged Learning Scheme. 

New Convenors

A leading Greek scholar of history didactics, Dr Angelos Palikidis, as well as cultural historian of Turkey, Dr Enno Maessen, and social historian of late Ottoman Empire Dr Filiz Yazicioglu have joined the Lausanne Project as new convenors. While Enno has already recorded several blog posts, Filiz will oversee the Turkish version of TLP’s website and help with its new programme on public health cooperation (see below). Besides co-leading the 2024 teacher’s workshop, Angelos will produce a textbook on Lausanne for high school history teachers in collaboration with TLP. 

Looking Ahead

Besides our aforementioned programmes, we now are working on a number of other projects, including:

Partitioning for Peace?

A workshop to be held at City University this November will bring together scholars from various disciplines and paradigms (politics, IR, history, literature, anthropology, media and communications, sociology, journalism, geography, migration studies, border studies, peace and conflict studies) to discuss new research on the past and present of the Cyprus question 50 years on from the events of 1974.

Toynbee or Not Toynbee?

1919 TOYNBEE MEMO ON HAGHIA SOPHIA

An academic workshop to be held at the Gladstone Library, Hawarden (Wales) in late 2024 or early 2025, with a view to publishing a volume to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Arnold Toynbee, historian and founder of Chatham House. Toynbee’s role in the British Foreign Office, his book The Western Question and his reporting on the Greco-Turkish War for the Manchester Guardian make him a natural focus for TLP, and his monumental Survey of History and later interest in urban planning add to his appeal. 

The Great Game of Pandemics

Thanks to funding securing from the Dutch Research Council (NWO), Gingko, and the European Research Council, we are starting a new programme that will examine the history of international public health cooperation in the Middle East and North Africa. We will record a new series of podcasts on how European, American and MENA actors collectively developed prophylactic practices to fight against waves of pandemics since the late eighteenth century. These will be published on the TLP website. A conference will be held on past and present practices of global north-south public health cooperation in 2026, and the proceedings of the conference are planned to be published as a new edited volume.

Our thanks to our contributors, supporters, funders, listeners and readers for helping to make all this possible.